Barry Salzman

recent Post

Events

Recipes

Share this:

Facebook
Twitter
LinkedIn

It Never Rained on Rhodes is about the universality of loss — loss of place, heritage, community and cultural identity — as explored through the lens of one small community that suffered unspeakable losses 70 years ago.

Five hundred years prior, the Jewish community on the Aegean island of Rhodes was formed in response to the Spanish Inquisition. In 1944, 1,673 people were shipped to Auschwitz from Rhodes, the farthest locale from which the Nazis deported Jews.

Six months later when Auschwitz was liberated, only 151 of Rhodes’ Jewish community survived.

Few returned home.

The 30-minute three-channel video that anchors the project is not intended as an historically accurate documentary, but as a contemporary abstraction of one community’s story. It avoids specific geographic, demographic and historic references, in order to transform the story of one community into a vehicle that emotionally engages broad audiences in the shared emotions of loss. The island becomes a metaphor for any place the viewer imagines it to be and the losses expressed by those in the film become the losses experienced by the audience.

The video is part of a larger photography and video art installation project. It includes audio, objects and text as well as video and photography.  The project was shot in four countries in 2013, and includes the surviving Jews that were born on Rhodes and 300 of their descendants. The life-size group portraits have been digitally composited into a continuous mural 6-feet tall that reimagines the community that may have existed were its future not so harshly truncated.

About the artist:

Barry Salzman was born in Zimbabwe and schooled in South Africa. He emigrated to the United States when he was twenty-one. After an initial career in business, he began working as a full-time artist. His interest in photography started when, as a teenager, he was moved to document racially segregated areas under South Africa’s apartheid regime, in an effort to understand the racial inequality that surrounded him. Today, his work continues to explore challenging social, political, and economic issues, including the increasing universal fatigue around the Holocaust narrative, the fraying of the American Dream, and society’s complicit behavior in the recurrence of modern-day genocide. In 2018 he was awarded an International Photographer of the Year award from the International Photography Awards (IPA) for his project The Day I Became Another Genocide Victim, which endeavors to humanize victims of the genocide in Rwanda.

Barry is a Rhodesli descendant from the Hasson, Capelouto & Almeleh families. For more info, please visit his website

Subscribe
Notify of
guest

0 Comments
Newest
Oldest
Inline Feedbacks
View all comments